Blue Jays Thoughts, April 17th Edition: In Which Joey Bats Comes To Life
After losing a disappointing set against the O’s on the weekend, the Toronto Blue Jays got right back in the win column last night, posting a 7-3 victory over the divisional rival Rays. That puts the team on pace for a 97-65 season, and in sole position of 2nd place in the AL East, whose standing is looking a bit twilight-zone-ish with Baltimore all the way at the top.
- Were you worried about Jose Bautista‘s slow start to the season? Even a little bit? Okay, maybe not. But Joey Bats decided to come out of his slumber yesterday, finally posting a line that is more Bautista like: 1-for-2, BB, HR, 2RBI. The home run was just Bautista’s 2nd, though it was a mammoth shot off Rays starter Jeff Niemann. That’s a 4-game hitting streak now for Bautista, whose batting average is still sitting at a paltry .222; I think we can expect that to rise rather swiftly.
- I’m not really sure what Jeff Niemann did to Adam Lind, but the Blue Jays 1st baseman would probably only want to bat against him in an ideal world. Lind continued to be a Niemann-killer last night, going 2-for-2 against him, in a 3-for-3 night that was punctuated with a 2-run bomb off the Rays righty. Lind came in to the game with a 1.308 OPS against Niemann with a pair of home runs, and he improved on both of those numbers today.
- But that’s not the end to the home run parade. No sir. Brett Lawrie added to the fun with a solo shot of his own in the 8th inning that gave the Blue Jays an insurance run to a 3-run lead…or one that took away Sergio Santos’ save opportunity. Depends on how you look at it, really. Lawrie is now on pace for a .300-81-32-130-16 season, so I guess you could probably say he’s right on track.
- Can we just all agree to stop the wave at the Rogers Centre? At least during games which aren’t complete blowouts? Not that I can go around telling people how best to spend their entertainment dollars, but starting the wave when you’ve paid money to watch a baseball game just seems counter-intuitive to me. You know that guy at the ball game that tries to start one every game? You know who he is. Next time you happen to be at the ‘dome, just kindly tell him there’s a perfectly fine ball game going on…or just to sit his ass down. Heckling, cheering are both perfectly good forms of expressing enthusiasm in this venue. The wave? Not so much.
- If you go down the Blue Jays batting order, you are likely to find some pretty dire numbers right now, with over half the batting order hitting below .250 at the moment. None of them, though, are quite as dire as that of JP Arencibia’s, whose team-worst .063 average is about indicative of how he’s doing at the plate to start the season. The good news? He won’t hit .063 for the rest of the season. The bad is that he’s lost at the plate right now, swinging at pitches that he can’t hit, and laying off ones that he should – case in point: Rays reliever Brandan Gomes walked Colby Rasmus to load the bases with 2-outs in the 6th inning, only to catch JPA looking at a fastball down the middle to end the breakout threat. It’s a pitch that Arencibia normally would at least take a swing at, and I think it’s demonstrative of the catcher pressing too hard to make something happen at the plate.
The teams will keep things going today, with a pitching matchup that will see Brandon Morrow taking the mound against Rays ace David Price – it should be a good one.
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